Jim Kroll, manager of the Denver Public Library’s Western History Department, has opened the library’s fifth- and seventh-floor exhibition space to a rich range of shows, from the work of Corky Gonzales to the Sisters of Loretto.

Many draw on community collections, but also on DPL’s magnificent collection of photos, paintings, books, maps and ephemera. The most recent exhibit is an eye-opening look at the amazing woman who first made Denver an arts town.

Helen Henderson Chain has been rediscovered thanks to curator Deborah Wadsworth, an art collector and library angel, who orchestrated this show of Colorado’s first resident female artist. In 1871, Chain and her new husband, James, opened a bookstore on Larimer Street. She set up a studio and exhibited and taught art in the store, which evolved into Colorado’s leading book, stationary and art supplies shop, as well as Denver’s first art gallery and publishing house.

Chain had studied with George Inness of New York, the celebrated landscape painter. She bypassed the ladylike florals and still life paintings expected of female artists of her day, instead daring to paint outdoor landscapes.

She fell in love with the Rockies, and became the first woman to climb Mount of the Holy Cross. She subsequently became the first female to summit many 14,000-foot mountains and also the first to capture them on canvas. She scrambled up Greys, Pikes, Longs and Lincoln peaks, dressed in proper long skirts and corsets and carrying her art supplies.

Chain also headed south to paint the pueblos of New Mexico decades before the Taos School painters would discover them. She painted New Mexico while touring the Southwest with famed photographer William Henry Jackson in a specially fitted Pullman railroad car arranged by Jackson.

In 1882, Chain became the first woman to ever exhibit paintings at the National Academy of Design in New York City.

Chain also proved to be a courageous humanitarian. After the Halloween 1880 anti-Chinese riot in what is now Lower Downtown, she grew appalled at the persecution of the hard-working, defenseless people who had been recruited to come here as cheap labor. In James Chain’s bookstore, she set up a school for Chinese immigrants, teaching them to read, write and speak English.

In 1892, Chain and her husband embarked on a round-the-world trip. They spent weeks in Japan, where she studied Japanese art. She wrote a lengthy scroll in the Japanese manner for the Denver Fortnightly Club, Denver’s oldest women’s literary club. The Fortnightly chest of papers, one of many treasures in DPL’s Western History Department, includes reports given by members since 1881.

For her report on the history of Japanese art, Chain illustrated the scroll with her own watercolors and renditions of famous historic Japanese works. She mailed the scroll home to the Denver Fortnightly Club, to be read in her absence. The next day, the Chains boarded a steamship and died in a typhoon in the South China Sea on Oct. 10, 1892.

Curator Wadsworth says Chain is “finally getting a well- deserved show of her own.” If she had lived longer, Wadsworth points out, Chain would have been the driving force in Denver’s pioneer art community.

William B. Vickers, in his hefty 1880 history of Denver, praised Chain as “a lady of cultivation and refinement, whose prominence in art circles merits more than a passing notice.” Thanks to the DPL exhibit (which you can see until Aug. 30), this remarkable woman should indeed merit more than a passing notice.